Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Marijuana and the 10th Amendment

I am no legal scholar, far from it actually, but it really seems to me now that the Supreme Court has been using the Interstate Commerce Clause for 50 years to trample the 10th Amendment.

The Supreme Court's reasoning seems to be as follows: Given the way the US is, practically anything done anywhere in the US can potentially have repercussions for some other state. Given that we are allowed to regulate things that will involve more than one state, we can pretty much regulate anything.

And so they have. But the 10th Amendment's point is: that the only thing the federal government has jurisdiction over are those things specified in the constitution. This clause was very clearly intended from stopping the federal government from the type of reasoning of the last paragraph.

The 10th Amendment really says that any kind of reasoning that concludes that anything is fair game for the federal government is simply illegitimate reasoning from the perspective of the constitution.

Yet the Supreme Court has been getting away with this kind of stuff for at least 50 years.

Oh, PS - I take back some of the not nice things I have said about Clarence Thomas. His dissenting brief on the medical marijuana ruling was exactly right.